The Atlas of Vanishing Landscapes: A weeping ice-cap sits patiently in your bathroom waiting for you to return from work, you feel a pang of guilt as you’ve not thought about it for a while. A giant iceberg materialises in the financial district – is it a harbinger, a signal or a ghost? There is financial risk behind this calving digital glacier, And who will tend it? We experience a vanishing glacier intimately and absent-mindedly in a world of chaotic cause and effect, where the data from our everyday activities accumulates and acts as invisible and abstract forces on a distant land. By creating a parallel reality, Yufei of our Department of Ghost Cartographies has reconstructed a fragile nature by translating the live city data-scape into a set of digital landscape apparitions. In this artificial geography, we drift along the dashed routes and contour lines, on an ever-changing map of a data driven landscape. The digitised terrain is presented as an instrument, appearing and vanishing in response to our daily consumptions. When the real places are no longer reachable and the maps fading to blank, the digital ghosts of these remote landscapes exist in the city as a placeholder for the vanishing physical ones, questioning our relationship to a disappearing terrain.
The landscapes are not just physical sites, but they all sit within our cultural imagination, as projections of our choices, icons of our actions.
Drift through a parallel reality, the fragile nature is reconstructed by translating the live city data-scape into a set of digital landscape apparitions.
A weeping ice-cap sits patiently in your bathroom, waiting for you to return from work.
The iceberg looks smaller than it did yesterday. A little piece has fallen off.
The water feels warmer than usual.
An evening stop at Costa, to escape from the rain.
You are sitting there with your cup of coffee, contemplating your own patch of rain forest, watching it lightly burning off with the nice smell of Americano.
Shoppers bustle through the street, rushing for the Christmas sales. It is almost midnight, closing time on Boxing Day and the cash register ring out. The mountain is rumbling and a pillar of smoke is rising, reaching almost 6-8km in height.
It was a strong year for consumer performance. Sales have been unexpectedly high, consumer confidence is booming.
The actuary is sitting beside, waiting the enormous amount of data flooding through his screen.
Monitoring points climb up the mountain ridge along past 5 mouths, with possible out-streams in a manageable range.
A giant ice mountain materialises in the city’s financial district. The apparition is shaking, the ice cap collapsing, frightened digital birds rushing across the gigantic open expanse surrounded by debris of ice.
Analysers are trying to search out that point breaking the market equilibrium, otherwise they’ll face great risk, while enormous stretches of pack ice and ice floes force stakeholders to turn back.
In the morning the electric train is taking young bankers to the new financial district of Canary Wharf, driving them through reflections of the dawn light, as bright as any simulated future blueprint.
These digital landscapes become sites in themselves. They are new types of landscapes for us, to prototype our actions, to test our decisions. They are the new territories we occupy, we care for, and we tend to. They are ghost maps to many possible futures.
